Political Thought, History of

Abstract

Historically, the focus of political thought has been on a triad of related problems, namely those of constituting a community bound by a normative order, of establishing the legitmacy and terms of enforcement of such an order, and of articulating criteria for allocations of resources and entitlements. In early modern Europe political thought was largely concerned with the nature and legitimacy of new forms of normatively binding orders and their terms of enforcement. The concern with the constitution of political community became the central one in political thought from Hobbes and Pufendorf over Locke all the way to Rousseau. The intellectual transformation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries entailed a shift in the thinking about human beings, about society, and about the very nature of political order. The end of World War I and the interwar years marked the triumph and crisis of liberal political thought and the emergence of a range of forms of political thought that transcended liberal traditions. The history of political thought towards the end of the twentieth century has been characterized by efforts to reconceptualize the nature human agency, whether in a rationalistic-deliberative form or in a linguistic-interpretative form. The first stream of research has led to formulations of the nature of political community in contractual terms. It has also sought to establish normative criteria for the proper allocation of resources. The second stream has resulted in programs for the writing of conceptual and contextual intellectual histories. It has also involved efforts to position political thought in a wider global context.